SmartInk Layer Problem with Powerpoint 2010 *Please Help!*

[disco_samurai]

Afternoon all!

 

I'm having a right drama with Powerpoint and the SmartInk software at the moment, wonder if anyone has experienced this?

 

Our school has approximately 100 SMARTBoards and we run the SmartNotebook Version 11 on all of the PC's (Windows 7 32 bit) attached to them.

 

We rollout the Smart suite of programs over the network, for the last year or more everything has worked fine with the system.

 

However approximately 4-8 weeks ago a problem has begun occuring across the school when using the SMARTInk software with Microsoft Powerpoint (we use Office 10 here). Teachers began to report that the Smart pens were no longer working within Powerpoint instead they were defaulting to the Microsoft Ink settings (i.e. the pens wouldn't draw anything they would just move the cursor around the screen)

 

Upon further investigation it appears the the SMARTInk add-in is not loading up correctly on Powerpoint (it still works fine on Excel and Word). When I check the add-in section of Powerpoints options it shows as inactive and despite setting it to load on startup it still will not load.

 

One interesting thing I have noticed that upon doing a fresh install of the SMART suite of programs the very first time you load up Powerpoint and go to the add-in section for the Powerpoint Smart Ink add-in it states "Not loaded. A runtime error occurred during the loading of the COM Add-in." this only appears the very first time you load Powerpoint.

 

I reiterate that the Smart Programs still work fine with Word and Excel it is only effecting Powerpoint and we have made no changes to our machines in the last couple of months (outside of MS Updates).

 

I've tried all the obvious things like reinstalling both office/smart programs, I even downloaded the latest 11.3 version of the SMARTBoard apps and tried installing them... same result... everything works fine except in Powerpoint.

 

Any ideas would be much appreciated!

 

Neal

[SHimmer45]

had a similar issue with win 7 and office 2010, is the os enabling "flicks"? i found that if you diabled flicks and reload word/power point the smart plugin works properly and the addin panel at the office product says "microsoft pen tools" and it allows you to write over your documents rather than acting as a mouse?

 

not excatly your problem but something worth trying?

IMO the new smart board software is ball ache and it all centres around "smartink" its a damn resource hog

 

PS: if flicks is enabled there will be an icon in the systray with a hand in the middle of blue/green arrows

[disco_samurai]

Hey thanks for the advice

 

I just checked one of the machines involved and it did have Flicks enabled, however disabling it didn't resolve the problem (thanks for the tip though).

 

I've logged a support request with SMART (since their crazy telephone number for UK support doesn't seem to work in any combination I can see!)

 

Neal

[Edu-IT]

I've yet to test this, because I assume I need to have a board connected before it'll work, but looking at SMART Tools the old pen options are still there in the floating tools. Could they not use that?

[disco_samurai]

Its weird but with this error even if you choose say a pen from the SMARTBoard sidetoolbar it still won't work when you try and use it within Powerpoint. Did some more tinkering today, completely removed Office & Smartboard software from the machine, removed all leftover files etc then reinstalled them both... it still fails to load the SmartInk Powerpoint add-in.

 

Neal

[twoods]

Has anyone figured this out? I had the user use a transparent background, but am hoping for a better fix.....

[SHimmer45]

is it loading smartink in power point or using microsoft ink?

[twoods]

It says that the SmartInk Add-on is loaded when I go in through options in PPT, I get an error for MS Ink upon start-up, saying it can't be loaded.....

[SHimmer45]

id say that MS ink and the smarttools ink are conflicting

[JHLEHS]

Hello All,

 

We have had the same issue here at our school, you can add a registry key in to set the COM add-ins to load on startup here's a useful MS KB: No Add-ins loaded due to group policy settings for Office 2013 programs. Be careful though and don't make the same mistake that I did and rolled out this key to all site as this will cause an error in Powerpoint on machines which do not have Notebook software installed. Doh! We also found that an reinstall of the product didn't work however, if you cleared the users local profile off the machine and reset their redirected app data this also worked. Maybe something you should try?

[twoods]

Thanks, the SmartInk is loading, so I don't think it's policy.....Is MS Ink something I can disable?

[JHLEHS]

The SMART Ink plugin for Microsoft Office behaves unexpectedly (170238) - SMART Technologies

[twoods]

Thanks, our users would rather use the SmartInk and disable the MSInk.

[StevieM]

Not sure if anyone is still having problems with this. If you upgrade to Smart Notebook 11.3, there is a specific option in Smart Ink Settings that relates to Microsoft Office.

[howartp]

Morning all,

 

Spent a couple of days playing with this here.

 

SmartInk was moaning about the Powerpoint addin not being found, and trying to enable the addin in Powerpoint failed with either a DotNet error, or trying to find libUsageTracking.dll

 

To cut a long story short, after two days of testing, we have discovered we didn't have the "Visual Studio tools for Office Runtime" pre-requisite installed on our PCs. If you downloaded the smartesi2013xxxadmin.zip from the IT Administrators download area of Smarttech.com, it SHOULD be in the /Support folder (vstor40_x86.exe) but the version I downloaded (v11.3 in September 2013) didn't have; if you download the 11.4 download now, it does have the files there. You can run them with /q to silently deploy, and you don't need to redeploy Smartboard afterwards.

 

Once that is installed, the Powerpoint addin lets staff users enable it if it isn't already; this prompts them to install the SmartInk VSTO (which is in the location below) which it lets them do with staff permissions.

 

c:\Program Files\SMART Technologies\Education Software\Office\PowerPoint\SMARTInk-PowerPoint-All.vsto

 

I'm about to read the link above about enabling com addins by GPO to see if that will sort out the final step, but I don't have a problem showing the affected staff how to do it manually.

 

Peter

[randle]

I'm having the exact same problem here and was hopeful with the last comment as the "Visual Studio tools for Office Runtime" pre-requisite wasn't installed however, even after installing this and rebooting I get the same problem.

 

Anyone else had any further luck?

 

I'm running v11.4 of the Notebook software so am on the latest version.

Edited July 8, 2014 by randle

[Latham]

Sorry to bump up a two-year old thread; but we've gotten something similar show up with Powerpoint 2016.

 

We're using Notebook 11.4 with Office 2016. The SmartInk layer loads up and defaults to the SMART settings and you can write with the pens in any other software that loads up the layer. So Word, Excel, IE, Chrome, Notebook itself all work. Our whiteboards even have the different colour pen trays and it recognises the colours. The issue we're getting is when you use Powerpoint in presentation mode. When you try and write on the presentation, the pen doesn't show up at all. Exiting from presentation mode, all the drawn ink suddenly appears in the Powerpoint file as if it was MicrosoftInk. But the setting is set to load in SmartInk.

 

The screens are extended, and the power point file is on the main screen on the teacher's desk. Moving the powerpoint application window to the whiteboard and starting the slideshow still provides the same results.

 

Anyone had a similar issue and (fingers crossed) resolved it?

[Bob_the_Goon]

@Latham. Did you manage to sort this? I'm having the same issue here, albeit with Office 2013. I've put the next day or so aside to rid us of this problem but if you have already solved it then maybe you could save me some time!!!

[Latham]

@Latham. Did you manage to sort this? I'm having the same issue here, albeit with Office 2013. I've put the next day or so aside to rid us of this problem but if you have already solved it then maybe you could save me some time!!!

@Bob_the_Goon : I can't remember exactly what we did, sorry - but we're not getting the issue anymore.

 

From what we've gathered throughout this term; it could one of the several things we've noticed:

 

 

• We updated the SMARTInk drivers on the whiteboard.
  
• We've disabled Presenter View from the other screen on the teacher's desk.
  
• We've allowed staff Write-Access to the computer's hard drive by putting them in an AD group that (via group policy) puts them in the administrators group in computer management. (This solved a few issues with other software that needed to write temp files to the software's install directory/windows temp folder). They can't see the C drive in My Computer, however.
  
• We found that the SmartInk layer add-in wasn't loading up for some staff so had to manually switch this on in Powerpoint. It wasn't until later on we had this issue though - and it was linked to roaming profiles.
  

 

That's all I can think of at the moment. I'm sorry I couldn't be more direct help - but that's all I can remember of what we've done SmartInk/Powerpoint wise since August.

[wibble_89]

Hello,

 

Any update on this, i am getting the same with W10 - 64 and office 2016 X-64.